Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  But, having posed his questions and voiced his potential concerns, Coit was already asleep, gently snoring.

  I tried to do the same, but the unrelenting darkness outside my eyes seemed more compelling than anything I might see with my eyes closed.

  Eventually I must have fallen asleep, though, because Coit shook me awake six hours later to take my turn at the watch. “Try to avoid turning the light on very often,” he said before dropping back on his bedroll.

  I envied his ability to sleep anywhere, anytime.

  Those three hours spent trying to stay awake in the pitch black night of the otherwise empty tunnels might have been the longest of my life. By the end of the stretch, I wasn’t sure if the noises I thought I was hearing were people coming toward us, normal sounds from the surface magnified by the echoing length of the tunnel, or entirely my imagination.

  By the time I heard Rafe and Coit stirring, I’d convinced myself that either I was going crazy, or we were about to face a ravening horde of the Thoughtless—those whose minds didn’t survive their fall through the Rift. Those who survived long enough were usually picked up and controlled by a black-magic sorcerer, who used them to raid villages, towns, and cities, looking for anything valuable and killing anyone who got in their way.

  I had to clamp down on myself hard to avoid screaming when I heard two sets of footsteps coming up behind me, even though I knew they belonged to Rafe and Coit.

  I pointed the beam of the flashlight down at the floor to give their eyes time to adjust.

  “Packed up your bag,” Coit said, tossing it to me. “You ready to head out?”

  I nodded, hefting the bag onto my shoulders. “This place is unnerving.”

  I managed to keep my voice steady, but I saw the corner of Rafe’s mouth twitch up in a grin.

  “How many times have you done this run?” I asked him.

  “Twenty, maybe twenty-five?”

  “If I’m still twitchy after that many trips down here, then you can make fun of me. Not yet.” I stepped out into the main tunnel and turned toward Brochan City. “In the meantime, let’s get moving. I want to get the hell out of here.”

  9

  I lost track of time as we hiked that day for hours, stopping only occasionally to eat or drink or relieve ourselves in some deep crevasse. The latter made my skin crawl in the dark, and I hurried through it as fast as I could.

  The tunnel finally came to an abrupt end, a solid rock wall that loomed out of the darkness at us, a ladder leading up to some kind of trapdoor.

  When Rafe led us up to the surface, we crawled out into the ruins of what once might have been some kind of church. I glanced around looking for religious icons of any sort, but if they had been there before, they were long gone now.

  I frowned, glancing around again and then studying Rafe. "So you're telling me that you managed to get out of the city, stumble upon a couple of boats, end up here, and just happened to find another tunnel?"

  The werewolf had the grace to blush, at least. "I might’ve had a little help."

  "Slavers?” I asked suspiciously.

  "Hell, no." Rafe's denial was emphatic. "Just the opposite. When I came out that first tunnel—the one I’m taking you to now to get you into the city—I literally stumbled into the middle of a group of children being pulled out of the city. Some of them had been rescued from slavers already, others picked up before the slavers could get to them. And the couple who’d saved them saved my ass, too.”

  “Showed you where the next tunnel was?” I asked.

  “And carried me when I got too weak to walk, and pulled me into one of the houses to care for me until I healed.”

  “Did they know you were a werewolf?” Coit sounded mildly curious, a counterpoint to my own indignant, half-accusatory tone.

  Rafe’s shoulders slumped. “By the time it was all over, they did.”

  “Did you take any of the kids out when you changed?” I asked tersely, weaving another truth spell and casting it toward Rafe.

  “God, no. I couldn’t live with myself if I had. No. Charissa and Xavier figured out what was going on with me and chained me down with silver for my first transformation, my first full moon.”

  “Any reason you didn’t tell us this back when you were telling us your whole story?” Coit asked.

  “Just hedging my bets,” Rafe said. “I didn’t think you were slavers—or even wanna-be slavers—but it didn’t seem necessary to tell you that we were going to be using one of the underground railroad’s main escape routes.”

  I started to ask what an underground railroad was, but I had spent enough time around Rifters to know that it probably would make any sense to me. Anyway, the implication was clear: people used these tunnels to help others escape from the slavers in the city.

  And my magic spell showed that he was telling the truth. I didn’t know what had convinced him to reveal the information now, but I was glad to know it.

  I had my own person to save from Brochan City and I was going to need an escape plan.

  “You said there’s a boat?” I stepped toward the open doorway of the church building, ready to feel the sun on my face again.

  Rafe nodded once and stepped in front of me to peer out the doorway, checking for potential danger. Coit shrugged and followed us.

  Green grass grew up all around the church, a clear sign that there was water nearby. Once upon a time, much of the land immediately outside the city had been irrigated. Now the land had fallen back into its usual patterns—green and lush near rivers and streams, more arid farther away.

  We followed Rafe to the river bank. He led us down a slight incline to the edge of the water itself, where the mod sucked at my boots and Coit cursed his permeable footwear yet again.

  “This way,” Rafe said.

  We followed the river for almost an hour, tracing the shoreline is the river bank grew steeper and steeper, then turned rocky, and finally turned into a sheer, limestone cliff rising at least 40 feet above us— not impassable, but enough to deter a casual explorer.

  “In here,” Rafe said, and disappeared.

  And blinked several times before I took a few steps closer to where he had been standing. Once there, I saw it—a slight indentation in the rock with an opening at the back. I had to turn sideways to squeeze through it, and I heard Coit grunting and scraping behind me, but we made it through into a kind of grotto, a cave with a small rowboat secured on the sliver of bank at the back of the cavern.

  Rafe was busily unhooking it and checking it over.

  I knew nothing about boats, but this one at least seem to be floating. It also had some paddles in it. And when we loaded up, it didn’t take on any water. I took that as a good sign.

  The exit out to the river was a low arch with long, trailing vines hanging down in front of it. Rafe bent over and I followed his example. Coit had to practically line the bottom of the boat, his blond bulk too much to make it through otherwise.

  In some ways, that boat trip was the most peaceful time I’d had in over a year—the calmest I had been since Brodric had left to go on his own Rift-quest.

  I let Rafe and Coit paddle—apparently they had both done it before—and simply watched the bank slip away beside me. I ran my hand through the water, watching the streams and eddies it created, almost hypnotized by the river’s movement. It was serene, a moment of lovely green rest in the midst of what was becoming a headlong rush into the most dangerous place in my entire world.

  I was almost sad when it ended.

  The first grotto had been natural. The one where we stashed the boat at the end of our river journey, several hours later, was not. Like the first one, it’s entrance was covered with plants and vines, and I suspected that they had been carefully cultivated, perhaps in both places. But there wasn’t room for all of us inside. Coit and I got out and splashed to shore as Rafe ducked inside the rough-hewn entrance to secure the boat.

  “The entrance is right up there.” Rafe gestured with his
chin at a point up above the bank. “We can camp in the tunnel, catch some sleep before we head into the city.”

  I nodded, half convinced that my hypnotic stupor on the boat had been as much exhaustion as anything.

  Somehow, the descent into this second tunnel was worse than the first.

  Instead of a staircase leading down to the basement and a broad door, we drop down into this tunnel from above, crawling down a ladder into a circular hole barely bigger around than Coit.

  Whereas the first tunnel we gone into had been wide and tall, parts of it perhaps even natural, this tunnel, like the second grotto, was man-made. It was dark and cramped and claustrophobic. The walls and roof had been shored up by bricks and rocks and wooden beams, and still I was convinced it was going to fall in on me at any moment.

  When Rafe passed the flashlight’s beam around, I shuddered.

  “Is it really that much safer to sleep down here than on the surface?” I asked.

  “It really is.” I heard mild regret in Rafe’s voice, though I couldn’t see his face. He’d turned around to begin setting up some kind of camp. “We’re far too close to the city to risk staying out of the opening longer than we absolutely have to.”

  “I’ll take first watch,” Coit said. I suspected he was feeling as claustrophobic as I was, but I didn’t say anything.

  Instead, I pulled my bedroll out of my pack and tried to get comfortable.

  10

  I had no idea when I began dreaming. But it started as suddenly as it always did—and I was gone, lost in someone else, with a different history, a different truth.

  A completely different world.

  Back in the Before, people used to start stories with “Once upon a time.” Lannie says that Once upon a time stories aren’t the truth, and if they’re not truth, they’re lies—and lies are the devil’s work. But Lannie says everything that’s not saving the food we have or finding the food we don’t have is the devil’s work, so mostly, I don’t pay much attention to what she says.

  In the After, we start our stories with “Back in the Before.” Old Joseph tells the best Back in the Before stories. He says his grandfather’s grandfather could remember the time Before and that his stories are real true history, passed down from father to son. But he doesn’t have any sons—or daughters, either—so I don’t know who’s going to remember the history when he dies. Mama and Daddy could have remembered the stories for Old Joseph. They knew how to read and write—they even taught me to read, a little. Mama taught me to read from a big book of Once upon a time stories. But they’re all gone now—Mama, Daddy, and all the books they had.

  Sometimes, now, I think those Once upon a time stories might be more true than Old Joseph’s Back in the Before stories. All the stories from back in the Before are full of magic: light machines that kept a whole house bright at midnight, cleaning machines that did the washing up after supper, and flying machines that took people all over the world. In Once upon a time, though, there were witches and fairies who tried to trick little kids, just like now.

  And parents always died.

  Sometimes I think the After might actually be Once upon a time.

  ‘Cause I know there are witches here, too.

  But I won’t be tricked.

  The first time I saw a witch, I was trying to avoid Lannie. She always wants me to do more work. And pray, pray, pray. I might not try to hide from her so much if she didn’t always want me to pray while I’m working. But she does.

  So when I woke up that morning, I took off into the woods before she saw me. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not like Lannie’s a bad person or anything. Everyone’s always saying how good it was of her to take me in after Mama and Daddy never came back from their last scouting trip. And she is good to me, as much as she knows how to be. She always shares whatever she’s got and treats me just like I she treats her own family. And she doesn’t know that I know it, but sometimes at night, when she thinks I’m asleep, she runs her hand over my forehead and brushes my hair back out of my face. Once, she even bent down and kissed my cheek.

  I just wish she wanted me to pray less and play more.

  Anyway, I was up early that morning and of a wonder, Lannie was still asleep. So I grabbed up my overshirt and boots from the floor where I’d dropped them the night before, and went creeping out the front door. The air was cool, but not cold yet—we had a few more weeks before the leaves started changing colors and dropping off the trees—so I didn’t bother with a jacket.

  Lannie’s house backs up to the woods, so as long as she doesn’t see me leave, it’s easy to slip off into the trees. Once I was away, I took a deep breath. I could smell the damp ground, the dirt and dew all mixed up under my feet. It smelled like freedom, and I grinned as I stretched, then settled into a long stride, walking quickly along the trail I had worn in the almost two years I’d lived with Lannie.

  I picked up a stick and was using it to whack the tall grass growing on one side of the path when I heard voices up ahead. I didn’t know who would be out here so early, but I knew if I got caught out in the woods by any of the adults from our village, I’d have to go back and work and pray with Lannie, so I stepped off the trail and hid behind a tree, watching carefully as the voices came closer.

  There were two of them, and I could tell they were witches by the clothes they wore: all in black with long cloaks and hoods that could come up to shadow their faces. The hoods weren’t up now, though. They were both men, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure from where I crouched low, peering out from behind the tree trunk. One of the witches had his face turned away, back down the trail, but the other was looking down at a long metal rod in his hand. The rod ended in a kind of dish shape and made a clicking noise. The witch carrying it had a yellowish tint to his skin and his face looked all pruned and puckered in toward the mouth, like a round piece of some of the yellow squash Lannie had pickled the summer before. He was taller than the other witch.

  “What are you getting?” the other one asked. I’d been wrong—they weren’t both men. This one was a woman, by the sound of her voice.

  “Not a damn thing.” The male witch’s voice matched his face, all yellowed and puckered. He sounded sour.

  His partner turned back toward him, and I saw her face. It was clear and unlined; she looked awfully young to be a witch. “There’s a village nearby,” the woman said. “We could check in there, see what they know.”

  The man chewed on his bottom lip for a minute, clearly considering her words. Finally he shook his head. “Nah. They wouldn’t know what we were talking about, anyway. Bunch of superstitious mud-grubbers.”

  I bristled at his words. We might not be the richest village I knew of—not that I knew of all that many—but we weren’t mud-grubbers. Now, about twenty miles away there was a village of mud-grubbers, folks that lived on the river-bank and fished out the long, mean-looking alligator gar fish, with beady little eyes and mouths full of sharp teeth. We traded with them sometimes, especially when Billie and her boys had a good forage day in the old city. We were searchers, foragers, sometimes even farmers, but we weren’t mud-grubbers.

  “You might be surprised,” the woman was saying in her light voice. “These old-timers out here know more than you might expect.”

  “And you give away more than you have to,” the man muttered.

  I didn’t care one way or the other—I just wanted them to move on. My legs were getting tired from crouching down, and the long grass was starting to make my arms itch where it brushed against the skin. It didn’t seem like they were likely to take me back to Lannie, so maybe I could just stand up and walk out onto the path.

  Then again, they were witches, and everyone knew that witches were full of tricks. They might just be trying to lure me out with all their talk of mud-grubbers.

  I would wait until they left, I decided.

  But then the man carrying the long metal rod took a step forward—toward my hiding place—and the clicking sound got fa
ster. He and the woman looked at each other. Without a word, they moved forward another step. The clicking got even faster and louder. I froze, uncertain of what to do as they took yet another step closer to my hiding place, then another.

  Finally, just as they were about to step off the path and into the grass, I burst out from behind the tree and took off running as fast as I could. I wanted to head toward the village, toward safety, but I knew better. If the witches already knew where I lived, they could find me there anyway. And if they didn’t already know, I wasn’t about to lead them to it.

  “Hey, kid!” I heard the man shout. “Wait up!”

  I glanced back and saw him standing at the edge of the woods. He wasn’t chasing me, but I put on another burst of speed, anyway.

  And I ran right into the woman, my face slamming into her as I turned back around. We both went down in a tangle of and limbs. The fabric of her cloak wrapped around me and I flailed, trying to get away.

  “You’re okay, you’re okay,” the woman was repeating over and over as she worked to untangle her arms from mine and hold me still all at the same time. She was stronger than I would have guessed—her hands clamped down on my arms like iron bands.

  “Got him?” the man asked, coming up behind us. “Hold him still.” He pointed his strange wand at me. It clicked rapidly, a staccato sound sharp in the clear morning air.

  I stopped struggling and gasped for air, staring suspiciously at the clicking device.

  The woman stared into my face, then glanced down at the rest of me. “I think it’s a she,” she said to the man. “What’s your name?” she asked me.

  I snarled at her. I didn’t have to answer her.

  “Who cares?” said the man. “We found one. Hurry up. Bind her and let’s get home.”

  “Slow down, Abe,” she said. “I don’t want to make any mistakes here.” She stared into my eyes. “Hi, there,” she said softly. “What’s your name?”